Does it surprise you to hear that Friends – the 1990s sitcom phenom – is celebrating 30 years on your screens this year? Quirky as the show was, at times, some celebration product and event collaborations are even goofier than many of the show’s plots…
Like Star Trek, Friends didn’t really hit its stride until after it went out of production and into syn-dication. In fact, it’s now spend twice as long in re-runs as it ever did in it’s original run!
Classic 1990s concept…
Warner Brothers officially described the show as, “about love and sex and careers and a time in life when everything is possible […] about the search for commitment and security […] and the fear of commitment and security. Most of all, it’s about friendship. For when you’re young and single in the city, your friends are your family.”
Classic ensemble cast…
The show chronicled the closely intertwined lives of its 6 principle characters, who all lived in the same lower Manhattan apartment building. And one of their favourite hangouts was Central Perk (CP), a fictional laid-back Greenwich Village coffee house with comfy chairs.
I don’t know if the show ever touched on the issue of breakfast service at CP. But if it did, it might have generated a few laughs at the expense of the establishment’s off-beat menu.
Which might have been what was going through the marketing department’s collective mind at General Mills when it designed Friends’ 30th Anniversary cereal: Vanilla Bean Latté-Favoured, Sweetened Whole Wheat and Corn Flakes. A mouthful, to be sure. In every sense of the word.
Launchpad to stardom…
The show proved to be a launchpad to stardom for the initially-unknown actors playing its 6 central characters. Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer are household names today.
There’s been talk all along, since the series wrapped in 2004, of a reunion or reboot. With the excep-tion of the (in)famous May 25, 2021 special. But more than one member of the original cast has put the brakes on any such development every time since then that the idea came up.
So, Friends Cereal may be as close to another reunion as we’re going to get…
My take
Get it while you can. No indication how long the celebratory cereal will be around. But it’s been con-firmed it will be available exclusively at Walmart (at least at first), starting ‘sometime this month’… And see if it helps bring back that classic 90s vibe for you!
~ Maggie J.